2011.03.20 — Language & Responsibility, Payback and a fushigi

This fushigi blog began in the blog "2011.03.18 —Language and Responsibility - Finished 2011.02.24." But even though it began with Noam Chomsky's Lang. & Resp., I'll begin here with Margaret Atwood.

In Payback she mentions the idea of a 'mental organ' associated with the concept of debt. She doesn't use the phrase 'mental organ' — that is a phrase from Lang. & Resp. — but this idea forms the pith of this fushigi. She refers to 'gene-linked configurations' as building blocks to what makes us fundamentally Human Sapiens Sapiens. Here is what she wrote:

... perhaps debt exists because we imagine it. It is the forms this imagining has taken — and their impact on lived reality — that I would like to explore.

Our present attitudes toward debt are deeply embedded in our entire culture — culture being, as primatologist Frans de Waal has said, "an extremely powerful modifier — affecting everything we do and are, penetrating to the core of human existence." But perhaps there are some even more basic patterns being modified.

Let's assume that all of the things human beings do — the good, the bad, and the ugly — can be located on a smorgasbord of behaviours with a sign on it reading Homo sapiens sapiens. These things aren't on the smorgasbord labelled Spiders, which is why we don't spend a lot of time eating bluebottle flies, nor are they on the smorgasbord labelled Dogs, which is why we don't go around marking fire hydrants with our glandular scents or shoving our noses into bags of old garbage. Part of our human smorgasbord has actual food on it, for, like all species, we are driven by appetite and hunger. The rest of the dishes on the table contain less concrete fears and desires — things such as "I'd like to fly," "I'd like to have sexual intercourse with you," "War is unifying to the tribe," "I'm afraid of snakes," and "What happens to me when I die?"

But there's nothing on the table that isn't based on or linked to our rudimentary human patterns — what we want, what we don't want, what we admire, what we despise, what we love, and what we hate and fear. Some geneticists even go so far as to speak of our "modules," as if we were electronic systems with chunks of functional circuitry that can be switched on and off. Whether such discrete modules actually exist as part of our genetically determined neural wiring is at present still a matter for experiment and debate. But in any case, I'm assuming that the older a recognizable pattern of behaviour is — the longer it's demonstrably been with us — the more integral it must be to our human-ness and the more cultural variations on it will be in evidence.

I'm not proposing a stamped-in-tin immutable "human nature" here — epigeneticists point out that genes can be expressed, or "switched on," and also suppressed in various ways, depending on the environment in which they find themselves. I'm merely saying that without gene-linked configurations — certain building blocks or foundation stones, if you like — the many variations of basic human behaviours that we see around us would never occur at all. An online video game such as Evercjuest, in which you have to work your way up from rabbit-skinner to castle-owning knight by selling and trading, co-operating with fellow players on group missions, and launching raids on other castles, would be unthinkable if we were not both a social species and one aware of hierarchies.

What corresponding ancient inner foundation stone underlies the elaborate fretwork of debt that surrounds us on every side? Why are we so open to offers of presenttime advantage in exchange for future though onerous repayment? Is it simply that we re programmed to snatch the low-hanging fruit and gobble down as much of it as we can, without thinking ahead to the fruitless days that may then lie ahead of us? Well, partly: seventy-two hours without fluids or two weeks without food and you're most likely dead, so if you don't eat some of that low-hanging fruit right now you aren't going to be around six months later to congratulate yourself on your capacity for selfrestraint and delayed gratification. In that respect, credit cards are almost guaranteed to make money for the lender, since "grab it now" may be a variant of a behaviour selected for in hunter-gatherer days, long before anyone ever thought about saving up for their retirement. A bird in the hand really was worth two in the bush then, and a bird crammed into your mouth was worth even more. But is it just a case of short-term gain followed by longterm pain? Is debt created from our own greed or even — more charitably — from our own need?

I postulate that there's another ancient inner foundation stone without which debt and credit structures could not exist: our sense of fairness. Viewed in the best light, this is an admirable human characteristic. Without our sense of fairness, the bright side of which is "one good turn deserves another," we wouldn't recognize the fairness of paying back what we've borrowed, and thus no would ever be stupid enough to lend anything to anyone else with an expectation of return (10-3).

I think this is interesting in itself, but now I here is one of the references to it in Lang. & Resp., brought up, here, by Mitsou Ronat, Chomsky's interviewer:

N.C.: We may think of universal grammar as the system of principles which characterizes the class of possible grammars by specifying how particular grammars are organized (what are the components and their relations), how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact, and so on.
M.R.: It is a sort of metatheory.

N.C.: And a set of empirical hypotheses bearing on the biologically determined language faculty. The task of the child learning a language is to choose from among the grammars provided by the principles of universal grammar that grammar which is compatible with the limited and imperfect data presented to him. That is to say, once again, that language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.

M.R.: The expression "mental organ" has appeared on occasion in these hypotheses...

N.C.: I think that is a correct and useful analogy, for reasons we have already discussed. The problems concerning this "mental organ" are very technical, perhaps too much so to enter into detail here. A particular grammar includes rewriting rules, transformational rules, lexical rules, rules of semantic and phonological interpretation. It seems that there are several components in a grammar, several classes of rules, each having specific properties, linked in a manner determined by the principles of universal grammar. The theory of universal grammar has as its goal to determine precisely the nature of each of these components of the grammar and their interaction. For reasons we have already discussed—having to do with the uniformity of acquisition of a highly complex and articulated structure on the basis of limited data—we can be sure that universal grammar, once we have understood it correctly, imposes severe restrictions on the variety of possible rule systems...(180-1).

I think that this is an interesting, albeit little, fushigi. But the idea of a 'mental organ' relating to language is particularly fascinating, and I explore it more fully on my blog Lang & Resp.